Search form

You are here

Scholarly Resources

Romantic Circles
Scholarly Resources is a collection of
online research tools approved by the General Editors
of the site, intended for the study of the Romantics,
their contemporaries, and their cultural contexts.

The British author Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806), best known for her acclaimed and innovative Elegiac Sonnets (1784), has a life story as interesting and difficult as her literature was admired and influential. This StoryMap, by Elizabeth A. Dolan and Gillian Andrews, demonstrates the way in which Smith's residential (in)security was related to her dependence on her father and husband, a situation common to eighteenth-century women. The Charlotte Smith Story Map is the first piece of scholarship to integrate information from all the known letters that Smith wrote; those included in Judith Stanton's 2003 Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, and also all the letters discovered in the last 15 years.

An Island in the Moon is an incomplete manuscript written in pen and ink in Blake’s hand. It contains the earliest extant drafts of "Nurse’s Song," "Holy Thursday," and "The Little Boy Lost," which make their first published appearance in his Songs of Innocence (1789). Topical allusions and the history of Blake’s associations with the London social circle of the Rev. A. S. Mathew and his wife Harriet in the 1780s suggest a period of composition c. 1784-85. The use of dialogue interspersed with song lyrics links the narrative to both contemporary theatrical forms and broader eighteenth-century satirical traditions. Blake and his brother Robert play central roles as the philosophers “Quid” and “Suction.” Although Blake left it orphaned, untitled, and unfinished in a heavily revised manuscript, Island is in some sense a primary literary experiment for him, setting the undertone of much to follow.

Originally intended to introduce a study of William Blake’s later prophecies, the
late Karl Kroeber’s Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies is an
accessible and astute survey of the prophetic work that Blake executed between
1788 and 1794. For Kroeber (1926-2009), former Mellon Professor of the
Humanities at Columbia University, the post-secular era we are now entering
should be prepared to recognize Blake’s centrality in academic literary
humanism, which—in its secular phase—excluded Blake on account of his radical
Christianity. Such exclusion, Kroeber points out, has not diminished Blake’s
immense—and still growing—impact on popular culture, on our music, fiction,
film, and graphic novels, as well as on our ideas of creativity, spirituality,
and individuality. In stark contrast to the idea of a “universal heart” and to
the ideal rational societies envisioned by other Romantic writers, Blake argued
that each individual was unique and that only complex social structures based,
not on reason, but on the imagination, like Golgonooza, the City of Art, can
realize and sustain the individual’s innate divinity.

This article serves as an online supplement to Laon and Cythna as edited by Michael J. Neth in Volume III of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. It contains a record of every
known draft variant of the poem, from surviving
first draft through intermediate stages to
surviving press copy, with the exception of stray
letters and marks. The italicized editorial
apparatus gives a description of the context of
each line and will help textually-inclined readers
with access to the published facsimile
transcriptions listed locate any passage they wish
to examine in greater depth.

In the absence of a full biography, this resource fulfills an urgent need to gather, collate, and circulate existing biographical and bibliographical information on the notoriously under-documented career of Romantic polymath John Thelwall in an accessible location and format. This chronology and bibliography charts what is thus far known about Thelwall’s residences and travels, his chief activities, his writings and lectures, and his correspondence, along with related events, and locations where primary texts can be found.

This resource documents the first full production of a John Thelwall play. It contains an introductory essay by Judith Thompson and a full performance video of the 2009 Dalhousie/Zuppa Theatre production of Thelwall’s 1801 “dramatic romance,” as well as a series of series of short video documentaries by student filmmaker Brooke Fifield, exploring the creative challenges, practical considerations and unexpected delights involved in bringing a long-neglected piece of radical Romantic theatre from dusty page to modern stage.

This
chronology orders all known Baillie letters
and provides more accurate dates and
identifications for many of the previously
published letters. By providing watermarks,
the place of writing, and the correspondents'
names, the chronology also gives a new
vantage point from which to view Baillie's
life and times. It is published in
conjunction with the Romantic Circles
Praxis volume Utopianism
and Joanna Baillie, edited by Regina
Hewitt, to which Thomas McLean contributed
an
essay explaining this chronological
listing.

Intended to help Romanticists keep informed about recent publications in the field, this resource offers the Tables of Contents to recent editions of selected Romantics journals, and offers an annual listing of books that are likely to be of interest to students of Romanticism.

This is a critical biography of William Taylor
of Norwich (1765-1836), translated from the
German of Georg Herzfeld (1897), with
additional introduction and notes. Translated
by Astrid Wind, edited with an
introduction by David Chandler.

In this essay, Joseph Viscomi
reads William Wordsworth's "Lines left upon a
Seat in a Yew-tree" and its revisions as part
of an antipicturesque discourse critical of
William Gilpin's and Edmund Burke's theories of
nature.

This special edition of
The Wordsworth Circle, published in
honor of Karl Kroeber, is available
courtesy of Romantic Circles in a PDF
format. Edited by Toby
Benis, this issue includes articles by
Carl Woodring, Martin Meisel, David Simpson,
Gillen D'Arcy Wood, James McKusick,
Joseph Viscomi, Regina Hewitt, William
Deresiewicz, Mark Jones, Steven E. Jones,
Marilyn Gaull, and Ursula K. Le
Guin.

This annotated bibliography compiled by G. Todd Davis summarizes numerous works of the 19th and 20th centuries that incorporate Lord Byron as a major or a minor character. Using historical and intertextual perspectives, this bibliography embodies Byronism, defined here as the production and reproduction of the Byron legend.

Take a pictoral journey through the
life of Percy Shelley, from his birth at
Field Place in Sussex, to his final resting
place at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. In
between, visit sites important to Shelley in
England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the
Continent, particularly Italy. Pictures and
text by Darby Lewes and Bob
Stiklus.

The Quarterly Review Archive
supplies original attributions of articles
published in the Quarterly during
William Gifford's tenure (1809-25). The site
also includes extensive notes on each of the
articles, annotated transcriptions of letters
by William Gifford and John Murray,
information about sales and publication
dates, a chronology of the founding of the
journal and a bibliography of contemporary
responses to the Quarterly's
articles.

A hypertextual list of novels, short stories, plays, films, and other fictional representations of historical Romantic figures, this resource began with a query to NASSR-L about the Romantics in science fiction; it includes a hyperlinked and annotated bibliography.

In August
2001, Roger Meyenberg and Patrick Vincent
hiked Wordsworth's route over the Simplon
Pass, as described in Book VI of The
Prelude. Their goal was to establish, of
several reconstructed versions of the hike,
which route Wordsworth and Robert Jones most
likely followed. Includes their narrative and
photographs of the pass today.

The Byron
Chronology is a searchable
hypertext chronology of important dates in
the life of George Gordon, Lord Byron. It
draws almost exclusively from Leslie
Marchand's standard three-volume biography of
Byron's life, with some additions from the
material in Marchand's edition of Byron's
Letters and Journals.

An archive of program copy from conferences and sessions of special interest to Romanticists. It includes a complete record of NASSR and ACR conference programs, as well as those of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Assocation, the Keats-Shelley Association, and the Byron Society, and the Romantics section of the MLA.

This resource presents a detailed index of Shelley's notebooks in the Bodleian, Huntington, C. H. Pforzheimer, British, and Pierpont Morgan Libraries. This index was created from a revised version of Tatsuo Tokoo's article originally published in _Humanities: Bulletin of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto Prefectural University_ [ISSN 0075-7381], No. 36 (December 1984), pp. 1-32.

An annotated
hypertext timeline of important dates in the
life and work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, this
chronology is designed to function both as a
stand-alone resource and in conjunction with
The
Romantic Chronology at UC Santa
Barbara.